Videos – Issue 62, April 2015

YouTube celebrates 10 year

On April 23, 2005, video-sharing site YouTube will turn 10 years old. The service was created by three former PayPal employees. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. It currently has around 800 million unique users a month, who upload more than 300 hours of video every minute. The very first was an 18-second clip, ‘Me at the zoo’, starring co-founder Jawed Karim.

Explore the Amazon with Street View

Google has unveiled a new ‘zip line’ view of the Amazon on Street View. You could already explore on foot or by boat but now you can adventure up into the tree canopy in a number of different locations.

Botany Downs Secondary College

Botany Downs Secondary College is a state coeducational secondary school (Years 9 to 13) located in Auckland. The school opened at the beginning of the 2004 and has a roll of 1800+. It’s a Mentor School in the Worldwide Microsoft Partners in Learning programme.

Bring print to life with Layar!

Print comes to life with Layar, the world’s #1 augmented reality application for iOS and Android. Download the free Layar App and experience augmented reality for yourself! Scan magazines, newspapers, posters and other print materials enhanced with Layar and then watch as extra digital content appears.

Need to collaborate visually online? Conceptboard is an online whiteboard where you can sketch, share and discuss ideas. Choose from various annotation tools, add files and images, and share your page by email or web address.

View one of WWII’s most infamous sites as you’ve never seen it before with Auschwitz: Drone video of Nazi concentration camp. Get a new sense and perspective of the place as you fly over the Nazi’s largest camp and now a World Heritage Site where more than a million people died.

The Khan Academy is working with art historians and museums around the world to create a collection of art-related materials. The result is Smarthistory, more than 1,000 videos and articles on art from around the world, across topics, and through time.

Teaching World War One History through Food offers a fascinating look at how people experienced the Great War. There are five videos exploring the war through food, covering topics such as food shortages, eating habits and recipes

Make the management of referencing research easier withRefME. This app lets you create citations, bibliographies and reference lists. Collect sources with a click, then export to other file formats in popular referencing styles.

Minecraft Blockopedia

If your students are Minecraft fans, then you’ll want a copy of Minecraft Blockopedia for your classroom or library. This fabulously designed book – which is 3D shaped like a hexagonal building block and comes complete with a stylish box – is well researched, too, containing all you need to know to get the most out of the blocks in Minecraft. With 312 pages and featuring 112 blocks, plus their variant forms, it’s an informative companion to the game.

We have a copy to give away. If you’d like to get your hands on it, go to

Flight to Freedom

It’s 1848. You are Lucy King, a 14-year-old slave in Kentucky. You want to escape but how will you do it? Will you find a path to freedom? This one of four great games at Mission US, a multimedia project that aims to teach history content through interactive games.

Garbage Dreams (fizurl.com/garbagedreams)

Take on the role of the Zaballeen, who recycle 80 per cent of the rubbish they collect on the streets of Cairo. Start with one neighbourhood, one factory, and one hungry goat. You have eight months to get recycling as high as you can. The game was developed to accompany the Garbage Dreams documentary (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/garbage-dreams/film.html)

Classcraft

Created by a physics teacher, Classcraft is a role-playing game for the classroom. Teachers are the Gamemasters, controlling the action. Students play in teams and pick from three unique classes (warrior, mage, healer), each of which come with their own health, AP (ability points), and powers.

The Last Symphony

This is a hidden object game set in mid-1960s England. The player is a museum curator tasked with the creation of an exhibit about R. Carmine, a composer from your city with an unusual past. By finding the objects, players reveals the stories of the people who owned them and the melodies that go with them. It’s one of many games created by the MIT Game Lab (gamelab.mit.edu/games/).

Weebly Edu (education.weebly.com)

Weebly is a web-hosting service that allows users to create their own sites using its easy-to-use ‘drag-and-drop’ builder. Choose your theme, design and put together the page, and you’re done. The ‘Edu’ version is designed for education.